A couple of years ago, the European Union and Barack Obama announced the creation of two macro-projects aimed at deciphering the functioning of the brain, investing billions over the coming decades. Never before had an investment of this magnitude been known to be applied to the knowledge of the human being. The effort to decipher this great mystery, as Obama himself said, will transform Humanity.        

Scientists involved in the study of the nervous system were undoubtedly excited by the interest - and the heavy investment - represented by these two initiatives. The American proposal , which has just received a new financial boost, is focused on developing new techniques for observing brain function in action. The idea is to develop and validate them during the first six years, and then apply them in the following six years.

The European version, translated into Spanish as project Human Brain, aims to be the neuroscientific version of the project Human Genome, which aroused so much interest at the time. Its roadmap highlights ten fundamental objectives, most of which are aimed at the great goal of achieving a computational simulation of the brain, in order to achieve a better understanding of the brain and to know how to better treat mental illnesses. Both projects recognize the need to join forces and boast of their interdisciplinary nature: it will not be rare to find geneticists, chemists, engineers, physicians, data scientists, etc. in the same room discussing the best experimental approach and interpretation of the results.

The outlook, I insist, is exciting, and even more so if one contemplates the possibilities of the techniques that have been developed in recent years: exciting or inhibiting neurons with a beam of light -optogenetics-, making a brain transparent to better observe the stained neurons -Clarity-, staining each of the neurons of a slice with a different color -Brainbow-, and so on. However, something is missing: it gives the impression that fifteen years from now we will know the brain much better, but we will have made little progress in the knowledge of the mind. Different positions on the relationship between the mind and the brain can be defended, but it seems reasonable that a major effort of research neuroscience should include both. Is this the case in the American and European initiatives?

The interdisciplinary efforts of these monstrous projects seem to forget something. Obama's Brain Initiative is explained in a document of almost one hundred and fifty pages. In it, the word "psychology" is mentioned six times, but never as one of the fields in which money will be invested; the word "mind", beyond expressions such as subject "we must keep in mind...", appears only once, in the first lines of the preamble. The word "Philosophy" is also found once, in the degree scroll "The brain initiative: vision and philosophy". I think anyone today understands that brain and mind go hand in hand, and that psychology and broad fields of Philosophy -Philosophy of mind, of action, of science, theory of knowledge, ethics, etc. - are adequate disciplines to try to understand the human mind. The European project seems to want to alleviate this lack with the creation of the European Theoretical Neuroscience high school , although a quick glance at its scientific program makes clear the computational character -engineering, to put it in other terms- of this theoretical approach.

I insist that these two projects are of great interest for neuroscience and society as a whole, and that in a few years time both will benefit from some of their fruits. But, as happened with the project Human Genome, on which they are inspired, and which seems to be shipwrecked in the waters of epigenetics, they will leave more questions than answers if they do not accept a truly interdisciplinary approach to the problems they are trying to solve.

The way in which neuroscience sometimes pushes aside other sources of knowledge, with complementary and even common fields, should be an object of reflection for the neuroscientist himself. Do we want to find easy questions for the answers we already have, or face the great enigmas of the human being with a collaborative spirit?

It seems that sometimes neuroscientists feel vertigo before the magnitude of the questions posed by our discipline, and we choose to minimize them in order to try to answer them completely from our experiments. The following example will suffice: just over a year ago, one of the most reputable researchers in our country said in an interview that concepts such as guilt are very unscientific, and therefore need to be revised. That may be so. It all depends on how far the scientist wants to place himself from the great problems of the human being.